I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
There is silence.
A long, steady hum.
And then there is something else entirely.
An explosion of motion and sound.
For a split second, absolute chaos.
It is as if her willing her heart to quiet has created this rift. And she, too tired to do anything but suck in a sharp breath. She, too foolish to leap out of the way. She turns, wide-eyed to blink imploringly at the stranger, the sound of that earth-shaking shriek echoing in her head. There is some strange stillness then, until he realizes that she’s there. She opens her mouth to say something – sorry, perhaps, as if this is somehow her fault, as if she should have known that she should have found someplace else to stand. But he shoots her an apologetic grin and then there is absolute nothingness.
She blinks and there is nothing but darkness. A long, pulsing emptiness. And then she blinks again and both the blackness and the emptiness have fallen away to reveal something else entirely.
The heart beats harder now, frantic. She sucks in another sharp, startled breath as she, too, registers the alien moon. She drags her focus away from the sky and shackles it to the stranger’s face. For a moment, she is too stunned to speak. Too stunned to move, even. Perhaps she should be angry, she thinks, but this seems unreasonable. Irritated, maybe. But even this seems like a stretch.
“Where are we?” she asks and there is a slight tremor in her voice when she asks it, the only thing that betrays the way her heart thunders in the cavern of her chest. Beats itself hard against its ribbed cage. “What happened?”
Maybe she’s dreaming. Maybe she’ll blink again and she’ll be back in the meadow. Or even all the way back in Sylva. But she closes her eyes and nothing at all has changed when she opens them again.
lilian
@[Ten]